Codenvy Factory For Instant Developers

By Adrian Bridgwater, October 10, 2013

Instant, shared development without requiring authentication, project creation, or configuration

Upcoming programmer company Codenvy with offices in San Francisco and, more interestingly… Luxembourg and the Ukraine, has described its development offering as a means of making cloud development faster and more reliable.

"Developers use cloud IDEs to eliminate administrative headaches and gain flexibility. We saw an opportunity to improve our own offerings. It took a new user 100 seconds to run a CloudFoundry HelloWorld with Codenvy. This was fast compared to the two hours required with Eclipse," said the firm.

But even 100 seconds is too long, says the company, as projects should be instant. Asking developers to create an account, login, setup a project, and configure a workspace adds unnecessary overhead.

The company has launched Codenvy Factory to enable instant, shared development without requiring authentication, project creation, or configuration.

In terms of use, a Factory is a URL that can be shared, placed on a website, or embedded in a GitHub page. Clicking a Factory creates a new, temporary workspace, preconfigured with the project encoded into the URL. The temporary workspace is fully functional and can be used to code, build, test, deploy, and collaborate. Work is saved within the temporary workspace, but if a user is idle or closes the browser, their work will be lost.

NOTE: Work performed in a temporary workspace can be copied to an account. Plus, it is possible for anonymous users to create accounts from within the temporary workspace.

According to the company's recent programmer blog and news channel, "Users who are authenticated with Codenvy can also use Factories. You will still be placed into a temporary workspace, but we'll identify you as a returning Codenvy user and make it simple to move the temporary workspace projects into your permanent workspace. It's easy to create a Factory of your own. Within Codenvy, you can create custom Factories, create an animated button to visually represent the Factory, and post directly to social media."

They continue, "Codenvy Factories can also be created automatically without logging into Codenvy. We have published a URL specification that allows 3rd parties to create Codenvy Factory references that will launch validated and functional workspaces automatically.

Factories can work with both public and private Codenvy projects. They also can work with public and private git repositories. We can perform a key or oAuth exchange with the git host to ensure proper access controls are maintained."

In the future, Codenvy will be providing Factory policies, parameterized Factories, and Analytics-style reporting on Factory behavior — this offers Factory publishers measurement and control over their Factories.

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